It’s been a wild couple of days for the team at Augur. Just 48 hours into their crowdsale, which launched at noon EST on August 17, they have raised in excess of 4200 BTC and 549000 ETH. “Unfortunately, the ether and BTC price keep falling, so the buys can’t keep up with the (USD) price,” said Augur’s marketing director, Tony Sakich. Bitcoin has dropped from $253 USD to around the $232 mark since the Augur sale began. It’s a remarkable feat for a company that has a somewhat esoteric product, built on Ethereum, arguably an as-yet unproven blockchain platform. Ethereum’s Frontier stage was released just last month, making Augur the first major platform to stake its claim there. Augur is an open-source, decentralized prediction market. […]

Awareness for Bitcoin has been steadily increasing in India, as online e-commerce merchants and small businesses have begun to understand the benefits of bitcoin as an international currency and as billion dollar tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM and VISA have begun to sponsor Bitcoin- and blockchain-related conferences, hackathons and meetups throughout the country. India has an Internet user base of about 243.2 million people and the country’s e-commerce industry is worth $12.6 billion USD. India has the potential to become one of the largest Bitcoin markets in the world, given the country’s extraordinarily large remittance market, which currently is worth more than $50 billion USD. Despite the growing remittance demands, much of India’s population is underbanked, suffers from poor […]

While the BitLicense has caused many companies to leave New York, those that intend to stay are progressing though the regulatory process. This week, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin services and wallet providers Coinbase became the 25th company to file for a BitLicense, which is expected to cost more than $100,000 in legal and compliance fees, according to Bitstamp Executive Vice President and chief legal officer George Frost. Since February, Coinbase has continued to work with the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) to improve the regulations and restrictions set on digital currencies such as bitcoin. Today, Coinbase is trying to engage with NYDFS in other states to become a fully licensed bitcoin exchange across the United States. […]

Smart contracts, a feature of “Bitcoin 2.0” technologies such as Ethereum, could empower criminals with sophisticated trustless collaboration means, the prestigious MIT Technology Review reports. Cornell University professors Ari Juels and Elaine Shi, with University of Maryland researcher Ahmed Kosba, present several cyber-crime scenarios enabled by smart contracts in the recently published paper “The Ring of Gyges: Using Smart Contracts for Crime.” The Ring of Gyges is a mythical magical ring mentioned in Plato’s Republic which grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Of course, criminals wearing the invisibility ring would commit all sorts of crimes beyond the reach of law enforcement. Shi joined the Computer Science Department at Cornell University in August 2015. Shi was recently […]

CoinWallet, a London, U.K.-based bitcoin wallet, says it will conduct a stress test of the bitcoin network in early September that will render most bitcoin wallet software worthless and create a “nearly 30-day backlog,” according to the International Business Times. They plan to accomplish this by flooding bitcoin wallets with small amounts of bitcoin. CoinWallet’s purpose is to convince developers and miners to implement a hard fork. The upcoming stress test is not CoinWallet’s first such attempt to make the case for increasing the block size. "As part of this test, I will be reconsolidating more than 150 Bitcoin that […]

Direct Relief, a charity known for its efficient giving, launches an eight-day campaign with a Bitcoin startup to take advantage of the currency's ability to be moved across borders at practically no cost.

A proposed California law to regulate virtual currency has drawn mixed reactions from industry advocates, in stark contrast to the New York BitLicense that met united industry opposition. AB 1236 sponsored by Assemblyman Matt Dababneh requires virtual currency companies to be licensed. The measure passed the Assembly in June and awaits Senate action. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), based in San Francisco, has launched a petition opposing the measure. Coin Center, a Washington, D.C.-based group, supports the bill, calling it a cautious and well-researched approach to virtual currency regulation. Both groups opposed the New York BitLicense, which recently took effect. […]

A 9.69 GB data dump is now online and believed to contain troves of private and confidential information from millions of Ashley Madison users after the infamous data breach that made headlines in July’s breach of the popular infidelity-favoring dating website.

Bitcoin price teetered on the edge of moving average support near $250 before finally rolling over the edge during the cross-over US/Asia-Pacific hours. Exchange charts show that price had sold off to their support floors near $220 and 1400 CNY before stabilizing near $230 and 1500 CNY. Bitfinex saw the January 2015 low of $160 on a downward spike. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3 hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Bitcoin Price Analysis Time of analysis: 05h11 UTC Bitstamp 1-Day Chart […]

Over-qualification has reached saturation point, meaning money invested in education is being wasted and young people are crippled by debt, report warns

Britain’s failure to create sufficient high-skilled jobs for its rising proportion of graduates means the money invested in education is being squandered, while young people are left crippled by student debts, warns a new report.

The mismatch between the number of university leavers and the jobs appropriate to their skills has left the UK with more than half of its graduates in non-graduate jobs, one of the highest rates in Europe, according to research commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).